1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to distributing network provider digital content more closely to customer premises to reduce the consumption of network resources; and, in particular, to installing content servers on customer premises nodes to move content even closer to customers of that content and to consume even fewer network resources, without an increase in infrastructure costs to the network service provider.
2. Description of the Related Art
Popular large digital content includes video, audio and imagery such as cable broadcast video (television) and audio (radio), on demand video and audio, and popular web pages. The delivery of such content to hundreds of thousands and millions of viewers consumes considerable network resources and can tax the available resources on existing network infrastructure. To reduce the load on network infrastructure, network administrators distribute popular content among several distribution centers strategically placed close to digital content consumers. This reduces the number of communication links the digital data must traverse and therefore conserves network resources. This also reduces the time between request and delivery of data. However, this also increases the cost of content storage because the same content must be stored multiple times. An advantage of this approach is that valuable content is replicated at the distribution centers and readily available for recovering from equipment failure at one or more other distribution centers.
Today, cable video networks utilize a media distribution mechanism that relies on the use of broadcasting all available channels simultaneously over different frequencies. Newer video-on-demand and IP-based video distribution systems still utilize a client-server model, whereby content is served from one or more servers in direct communication with a set-top box (STB) or personal computer (PC). Some servers utilize a multi-cast model whereby data streams are transmitted to fewer than all customers on the network. As with cable video data, Internet traffic is often served via well-placed servers which cache recent high-demand web content. The servers are distributed around the service provider's access network as close as reasonable to the customer equipment, while balancing the costs of maintaining the extra servers. These caches, distributed content servers, etc. push the content closer to the user which is receiving the data, yielding more efficient network utilization and faster interaction with the user.
While suitable for many purposes, the approach of moving content servers and caches closer to customer sites is that the same data is still stored and distributed multiple times. Multiple storage and distribution occurs even in the case where multicast streams are used to reduce the number of individual flows. The extra storage involves extra hardware at one or more servers or extra servers compared to more centralized content servers.
The extra costs are likely to worsen with time. Requirements for distribution of high definition television (HDTV) signals, voice for both residential and business customers, and ever faster data services, will continue to force service providers to consider more efficient approaches for content distribution.
Based on the foregoing, there is a clear need for techniques that provide the benefits of distributed content servers without suffering all the disadvantages of prior art approaches. In particular, there is need for reducing consumption of scarce network resources of a service provider without bearing all the costs of increased storage centers.